Forever Young)
by mei0023
Summary: The characters of GW look back on themselves before the final episodes... to "Forever Young" by Alphaville. PG-13 for incidents of strong language and angst.


LEGAL DISCLAIMERS:   
MWAHAHAHA!!! I AM BACK!!! Evildoers REJOICE!! And all you goody two-vernies... beware. *evil grin*   
Aaaaaaanyways, figured I'd return... Between "Spectres" (which got all the praise) and "No One and Everyone" (which got all the stares), I figured I'd try my hand at something NEW (yes, besides epics and dark psychological pieces). That's right- SONGFIC!!!! (BEWARE!!)   
So, of course, I figured while I'm at it I might as well have some FUN (damn straight), so I enlisted the help of the AMAZING F&M Canon, and plucked out the lyrics to the best song there.   
Beware. I AM BACK!! 

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"There is something about the rebellion and beauty of youth that really is perplexing to those who have left it behind so early... The knowledge of the oneself, the steadfast determination not of living as long as possible, but undoing what the previous generation has left behind... The determination, the perseverance, and the everlasting poetry of the spirit which only gathers its voice once in our lives." ~ Anon   
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(Forever Young)   


Quatre sighed and slid the bow over the strings of his violin as the notes reverberated throughout the room. It was a warm, melancholy sounding song, something that made Quatre ease into a smile. The oddity of it was the tempo... something that made it almost a dance, a sort of slow waltz that somehow didn't fit in with its melody. A sentimental remembrance that had somehow lost its place amongst the jumble of notes and strings, somehow reasserted itself as it flowed up his arm and through the bow onto the delicate strings.   
He leaned back in the chair, feeling the comforting warmth of the music slide over him and transport him to some place not his own. Some place not of his doing.   
He winced as he struck a sour note. The world faded instantly and returned him to his study- his desk, books, thick carpet and overstuffed armchair in which he was now resting. He tried desperately to grasp back his moment of reverie, only to find it slipping ever quicker away. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to search for some small fragment, some memory that he could just grasp for the time being, until the war was over and life returned to normal... To peace. To what would be left, at the very least...   
His head sprang up as the door opened slightly. Quatre smiled to see the familiar mess of brown hair and faded blue jeans looking in on him. "Trowa..."   
"I heard you playing." He looked at Quatre with what almost seemed like sympathy.   
Quatre felt himself crumble internally, and hung his head. He could never lie to those eyes. Something about them made him... speak. All the truths. He couldn't hold it when Trowa looked at him like that.   
"Can you play it again?" Quatre looked up, almost startled, and saw the honesty radiating from the figure in the doorway. He felt a small, melancholy smile break his face, and he nodded as he gently picked up his violin. He set the bow gently back on the strings and began to play.   
To Trowa there was no purer magic than the kind that radiated from the small, frail blonde boy at that moment. The music that flowed was beyond music. It was something... heavenly. Pure. The last remaining purity in the universe. As if being led by the melody, he stepped into the room and extended his hand to Quatre.   
"May I have this dance?"   
Quatre blinked and slowly let his bow slide from the violin, resting it in his lap. After a moment's pause, he smiled wearily and stood.   
"Of course."   
He took Trowa's hand. The two slid their arms around each other, and began to dance. Not even dance, really. Just sway. Quatre closed his eyes and embraced Trowa tightly, and the two barely moved from the spot as the sweet strains of the violin echoed deep within them. 

_Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while_   
_Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies_   
_Hoping for the best but expecting the worst_   
_Are you going to drop the bomb or not?_

Duo closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands. The surf beat almost rhythmically against the shore, sending foam up to curve patterns in the sand.   
He watched it with a sort of desperate ache, an unquenchable desire to loath the water, the foam, the shore itself. How dare something so base, so primitive as the sea foam carve away at the intricacies of the dunes until they were leveled completely? The complexities of the sand grains... they should easily have adapted by this point, adapted to absorb the water, to stick together in some form or another to avoid being washed away. It was such a simple concept, but nature... no, not even nature, God himself... had elected to keep the sand swirling away from itself, dissolving so easily and separating until it was leveled completely, and only those at the bottom were left to survive.   
He felt his eyes well up slightly as he watched the sun set in the glory of the spectrum across the water. As a child he'd always wanted to be alongside the sun when it set... just to see where it went. Where did it hide, exactly? Sister Helen used to chuckle, say that it wasn't the sun that hid, only the respective halves of the earth. Or, in their particular case, the colonies that hid behind in Earth's shadow.   
The memory of Sister Helen sent a surge of angst through him. He clutched his head, almost an effort to stop the tears that were rapidly welling behind his closed eyes. The desperation that overtook him was more than he could bare, and for a brief moment he considered climbing into Deathscythe and finally hitting the self-detonation button that would bring all this misery to an end...   
No. The explosion would attract too much attention. The data box would probably be recovered from the smoldering heap of gundanium alloy, and Operation Meteor would be jeopardized, if not struck down altogether. As if it still existed in the first place... For all anyone cared, the Gundams were nothing more than a handful of teenagers caught in the middle of some war whose policies and morals were far beyond them.   
Beyond them... Beyond what? What exactly was beyond them by now? He had become the God of Death. A being who knew all, whose morals were its own, who had no age and therefore no limit to its wisdom. It baffled him... Those who were asking for total pacifism, Relena particularly. She had called the war "insanity." The war wasn't insane, it was those who were fighting. The universe had gone mad.   
He clutched at his hair tightly as the tears lingered in his eyes, opting on their own accord not to fall. He squared his jaw, and found himself suddenly striding towards Deathscythe. The tears shone in his eyes even as he tossed his head defiantly. If the universe had gone mad, then who was to stop him from following suit? After all, he'd only be "obeying orders." He found his mouth forming words as he neared the almost ethereal figure of his Gundam shining in the blood sunset.   
"When I die..." he began, lowering his head and fixing his gaze on his death, "bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass." 

_Let us die young or let us live forever_   
_We don't have the power but we never say never_   
_Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip_   
_The music's for the sad man_

Wufei rested the small bouquet of roses by the headstone. One of his only opportunities to attack a central Romefeller base, and he ended up here. At the grave he hadn't visited in years. Not since the funeral, at least. It had been the last time he recalled ever cracking his mask of a face in an emotion other than rage. Frankly the feeling he had let slip had become almost completely alien to him... He couldn't even place a name on it anymore. The closest he could reach was insanity.   
The balance of it all bothered him... It was like having a fly buzzing about your ear that you couldn't flick away. It kept ringing in his ear, buzzing little sing-song reminders of the rest of the world. Frankly it was annoying. Not even disturbing, just... irritating. If even that. The war itself had become merely an annoyance, an irritation, a minor disturbance. In any case the universe would go on as it always had- the earth holding the colonies in check, people milling about their daily lives naively, children being born as always.   
Children would continue on. No matter what, they seemed to run freely over everything with a sort of innocent shine that dissipated the moment they knew of death. When Wufei had still been a child, Master Long had commented that "children are the gods' way of saying that the world should go on." Something always continued. Even though the innocence was lost so quickly for some.   
Then there were those who never lost an ounce of innocence within them. Heero always complained that Relena Peacecraft was a walking innocent bent on making their lives miserable. Peacecraft wasn't innocent- she was stupid. Ignorant. Idealistic. But she knew of death and thought little of it when thousands were killed on her behalf. Perhaps the girl had never had her innocence in the first place. Quatre, on the other hand, was a perfect example. The child was so naive that he was blind. Pacifism never solved anything that was worth the effort. He apologized to people before he killed them. The very thought was absurd, at least to Wufei.   
Innocence was a curious thing to him... He never recalled it consciously, though often he had dreams of his mother and father playing with him as a young child... The dreams were disturbing, to say the least. He often woke up sweating and with his throat hoarse... as if he had been screaming. It confused him. The harder he tried to push them away, the more they came back- each time more frequent and much more vividly than before. He'd even begun to remember a young girl- older than him, but almost always there. She never did much, just sat there and smiled every now and again. But her small face was almost always the same- stern, fixed. Almost cold. He'd never remembered having a sister, or even a cousin for that matter... but perhaps she had died. Caught the L2 plague. Been killed in the early stages of the war, possibly. Maybe she had just left one day, stolen away to return to wherever she was from. China, perhaps.   
That was another thing that bothered him, perhaps more so than the odd balance of the war. He never figured out who that girl was, or what she was doing being around his family. Sometimes in the middle of a battle his mind would pause and suddenly begin pondering where she had ended up all those years later. He would return to the present only to find the battle over and heaps of smoldering Leos scattered in every direction. The thoughts plagued him constantly. Her eyes were always so warm, but her face was frozen. Almost as if there was some shred of innocence trying to struggle out in the oppression.   
He knelt in front of the headstone and sighed. "I don't know why I'm doing this, honestly... I never knew you well." He looked at the stone. Perhaps that had been why he loved her so much. The grief had faded, but when it flared it could be almost unbearable. Always hearing her voice calling his name as if it was a joke. And his own voice sometimes responding, out loud at that. Always a soft "Meiran" that he wondered had occurred.   
He stood and left the roses. The questions plaguing his mind about the future refused to quiet as he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked back to his beloved Nataku. The justice of it all baffled him. 

_Can you imagine when this race is won?_   
_Turn our golden faces into the sun_   
_Praising our leaders, we're getting in tune_   
_The music's played by the madman_

_Forever young, I want to be forever young_   
_Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?_   
_Forever, full never_   
_Forever young, I want to be forever young_   
_Do you really want to live forever, forever young_

Dorothy sat quietly in her study, her hands folded nonchalantly in her lap, her head bowed in thought. She was surrounded by such beauty... Such beauty in such chaos. At times it felt as if she were the only one who could see just how lovely it all was, how patterned the chaos was. It wove its own tapestry of war, some noble and ancient battle that never quite finished. It was almost as if it were some sort of ancient script whose ink had never faded or been touched by the light of day, and yet repeated the same lines over and over again, only in complex and diverse patterns that all lead to the same ending- which, coincidentally, happened to be the beginning as well.   
She smiled quietly to herself. She admired those pilots- the one named Heero, particularly. Such poetry there. The ultimate soldier. The perfect human. Others would have debated her titling him as perfect, let alone human. She begged to differ, of course. Just as always. Heero was somebody who lived for battle, the defining factor of humanity. What other species battled for such meaningless things? Food, shelter, and territory were the only things primitively necessary, and the one thing that separated humans from animals was their emotions and their pettiness. The Wing pilot stood for just that- the emotionless face who acted on impulse, on internal commands that sprung straight from his humanity. It was almost sad that he was suicidal.   
She honestly believed that 01- 'Heero Yuy,' as he was psuedonymally known- was the embodiment of all humanity and stood for everything that had and would ever happen to the species. In the end he would die trying to achieve something hopelessly beyond his reach, to quell something that sprang from Time itself and would replay for all eternity. But his masochism was the brightest color in the tapestry. Each belief sprang its own color, its own idealistic form in the masterpiece. And Heero always stood opposite Relena, deities of two beliefs, reaching as if almost to touch each other and each to make sure that the other was real.   
She stood. She would prove herself a figure in that tapestry, soon enough. The complexities of its weaving were not unknown to her. She wove it herself frequently enough. Manipulation was the key to victory, to presenting her gift of beauty to the world. She wanted the world to be so beautiful.   
A small knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She turned away from the window to the door. "Come in."   
"Miss Dorothy, your grandfather is here to see you. Your escort is waiting outside." The maidservant kept her gaze apart from Dorothy's in respect. Dorothy smiled gently.   
"Send him in. And please, such formalities are unnecessary." She watched as the maidservant nodded gratefully and retreated. After a few moments, Duke Dermail stood in the doorway, smiling warmly with the same, grand air that had always seemed to cling to him.   
"My granddaughter, it is hard to believe how much you have grown since I saw you last." He made his way into the room, almost beaming with pride. "You look more and more like your dear mother every day. You have grown to be so lovely." He stepped aside to let her pass to the doorway.   
"Indeed, grandfather." Dorothy smiled softly as she passed him towards the door. "Indeed." 

_Some are like water, some are like the heat_   
_Some are a melody and some are the beat_   
_Sooner or later they all will be gone_   
_Why don't they stay young?_

Heero grumbled. Another mission botched. All by that damn girl whom he loathed incessantly. She fancied herself a soldier amongst all this- possibly the one thing that annoyed him the most. Had she been brought up since birth in an institute to be trained? Had she ever pondered where her parents were, and why they had abandoned her to live out this sort of life? Had she ever wondered exactly which way to turn and found her ideas questioned? Of course not.   
She was Princess Relena Peacecraft of the Sinq kingdom. She wondered about nothing.   
He shook his head to try and clear his mind. The inside of the Wing Zero returned to him. He glanced around at the control panels and frowned. Where would he end up going if he did kill her? Possibly to the war's end... Possibly to its beginning all over again. In any case the war would end eventually, with or without him, and life would most likely move along. If he died, it would be over. If he grew old...   
He didn't want to grow. He wanted to die, quite frankly. Die in battle, or shortly after. Age was something that was more a hindrance than a help- he had no reason to fight after this. Battle was what he lived for, what he was raised for, and the one thing his heart really longed for the most.   
Relena would have scoffed at him for that; Quatre would have frowned and gone into a proverbial hissy-fit about how battle was useless and it was something that humans never needed in the first place. Hence why he never spoke much. If he opened his mouth to speak honestly of what he felt, then he would be pestered by the others. Nothing really annoyed him more than Relena- but if anything came close, than it was Quatre off on his rants about peace and the Heart of Space, whatever that was. Mostly the reaction was a cold stare and silence, occasionally a well thought reply which left Quatre practically pleading to his "humane side," if he even had one. Most of the time he had to restrain the urge to tell them all to go fuck off. He didn't want to be bothered and, quite frankly, couldn't afford the time.   
But still the thought held true, for him at least- if there was anything that he lived for, it was battle. There wasn't much else he knew about. When the war ended, when there were no more battles to be fought, when he began to get old... The disgrace of needing assistance was something that, to him, was unbearable to think about. He lived on his own and, if this war didn't kill him, then he would kill himself.   
He glanced around at the cockpit of the Wing Zero and felt the thoughts churn themselves over in his mind. Perhaps Zero was the source of the darkness he couldn't seem to outrun. The system overriding his logical thought. Or maybe it wasn't the system at all- maybe it was just the accumulating doubts from years of training to believe that battle was the only honorable way of solving anything.   
His perpetual frown deepened, if at all possible. He hated thoughts. They only seemed to get in the way. He found himself with his head tucked to his chest and his arms folded as he drifted into an uneasy sleep. 

_It's so hard to get old without a cause_   
_I don't want to perish like a fading horse_   
_Youth is like diamonds in the sun_   
_And diamonds are forever_

Relena glowered slightly. She wasn't accustomed to the expression, but it seemed to crop up as appropriate every now and again. Appropriety was her business.   
She found it hard to withstand the onslaught of the Gundams upon military troops- guerilla warfare was so base. Frankly she found it hard to tolerate the Gundams at all. Her own brother had been seduced by a Gundam's promises... Now she was quite sure that he was insane. All of them were. Wufei considered himself almost a St. Michael- judge of the justice in mortal's hearts. Quatre she found quite amusing at times- she got along with him particularly well, though his naïveté and the loss of his father had all but driven him mad with grief and confusion. He almost reminded her of a lost puppy- it sat there looking at you with its big, sorrowful and innocent eyes and you couldn't help but take pity on it and bring it home with you... only when you weren't looking, it grows into a dog that was entirely more of a hassle than you bargained for.   
Trowa was almost frighteningly silent. He had a keen intellect- he was even brilliant- but he only spoke when called upon, or when he felt that somebody would kill themselves due to poor planning. His eerie silence and the fact that you could only see half of his face under his mess of brown hair was something that unnerved Relena thoroughly. It was almost as if he was hiding something.   
Duo was a walking psychological file. He hopped around merrily around calling himself the God of Death. Almost as if it were something to be proud of. Relena acknowledged that he had lost all semblance of a family quite early on in life, but his own deep-rooted belief that he was almost a Satanic figure was far beyond disturbing. There was no question that he was probably the best pilot out of the lot- he could wipe out an entire armored OZ division before you could realize what was going on. The calm smirk he wore when he made something explode, killed an enemy by the troops... that was the disturbing bit.   
Relena shook her head. Then there was Heero. He was quite a case of his own. He was most likely just as psychotic as Duo, if that were at all possible. But something about him made Relena love him. She did love him, despite his irritation at and avoidance of her. At times she wished she could be the one in the cockpit and have him safe on the political front. Of course, after thinking exactly how Heero would have handled the politics of it all... the wish faded and she begrudgingly returned to reality. Even so, she loved him beyond all others and wished him nothing but victories. Victories in battles. Where others died.   
She sighed and rested her head in her hands. The empty swing was something she had left unattended since times that she couldn't even remember. Pagan had told her that she used to play on the swing set when she was barely able to walk- she found it difficult to believe that she'd ever had a connection to something that she couldn't even recall the presence of. Yet Pagan insisted that Milliardo used to push her back and forth on the swings when she was but a young child. She'd scream and laugh and ask to go higher- and Milliardo would always happily comply.   
She looked around at the swing set. By now it was rusted, the paint fallen almost completely off. The set had fallen into disuse since her departure from home. For some reason it had survived the multiple attacks on the kingdom- and weathered it better than most of the castle itself. She felt her glower melt slightly as she swung back and forth gently, her feet scraping the sand in a familiar sort of way.   
"Some day this will be over, Heero," she whispered to the setting sun. "And you'll come swing with me. Someday."__

_So many adventures couldn't happen today_   
_So many songs we forgot to play_   
_So many dreams are swinging out of the blue_   
_We let them come true___

_(refrain)___

_(end)_   


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fin   
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Enjoy? ^.^ I thought the song was appropriate- Alphaville wrote and sang it during the Cold War era and it centers around life as a teenager living in fear of nuclear war. There are so many emotions running through the characters in GundamWing that it's almost like they're living through a sort of Cold War of their own. It's a beautiful song, very sad but somehow heartwarming... in case you haven't guessed, it's the song that Quatre's playing. =) R&R, por favor! 

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"The pure, the beautiful, the bright,   
That stirred our hearts in youth,   
The impulse to a wordless prayer,   
The dreams of love and truth,   
The longings after something lost,   
The spirit's yearning cry,   
The strivings after better hopes,?   
These things can never die."   
_"Things that never die,"_ Sarah Doudney ca. 1860   



End file.
